Re: screen flashing to black every several seconds - Solved - well, sort of

Pete wrote:

Claude,

I had this problem too. The screen would just black
out mysteriously and then return again, without any
seeming rhyme or reason..........

The problem seemed to be dpms. Go into KDE Control
Centre and disable dpms under
Peripherals/Display/Power Control. This seems to do it
just fine. I have never had the problem again. If you
are using another window manager, and just to be on
the safe side, put a '#' in front of the line "Option
dpms" in the monitor section of your
/etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

I tried this, and then applied the updates, but the problem returned. DPMS was already off in Power Control, but there was an earlier bug reported with this that someone had worked around by turning it on, applying some settings, then setting all the settings down to their minimum values, applying those, then turning DPMS back off. This actually helped me solve a slightly different problem, earlier in my Linux career. This is what I did tonight but it made no difference.

I read through the thread and somewhere noticed
mention of nvidia. I am not sure whether you have an
nvidia display adaptor (I have), but the nvidia driver
README.txt says that DPMS is experimental and not
fully supported. So far, they have only implemented
the most rudimentary functions, like screen blanking.
And who wants that, with the beautiful X
screensavers...

My card is the ATI Radeon 9200SE.
I remember when I was reading through Bugzilla reports that were close to my problem, that there was mention of problems with DVI and some Radeon cards, or something to that effect. So, tonight, after I went through the above procedure, I disconnected the DVI cable and connected the VGA. The flashing to black has stopped. Obviously, one would wish for DVI to work, but, this gets me past the problem, for now.

--
Claude Jones
Bluemont, VA, USA